.avif)
By now, you’ve likely seen the story: Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Catholic church, decided to handle something very normal: updating his address and phone number at his Chicago bank.
He called, gave his name, answered every single security question correctly. Still, the representative told him he’d have to come in person to finalize these changes. Despite noting that coming in might be a challenge given his current situation, the agent remained firm. Pope Leo gave one last Hail Mary: “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?”
The agent hung up.
The internet, as the internet does, exploded. Father Tom McCarthy, a longtime friend of the Pope who shared the story at a church service in Illinois, put it perfectly:
“Could you imagine being known as the woman who hung up on the Pope?”
Enterprise contact centers are under relentless pressure to move fast. Handle times are tracked, queues are monitored. Agents know that spending five extra minutes on an unusual situation has a cost. Consciously or not, unusual situations get resolved the most efficient way possible: by ending them.
We’re not here to pile on the agent; when you’re moving that fast, you’re not stopping to ask whether the person on the other end of the line is actually calling from the Vatican.
It’s likely that she never had the bandwidth to make a judgment call. When every customer interaction is a race against the clock, human intuition and judgment may be the first to go.
This is the paradox facing every enterprise CX leader right now: the moments that matter most – the complex, the unusual, the high-value – are often the ones that get the least attention in a high-volume environment. How many of your customers – maybe not the Pope, but your most valuable accounts, your longest-tenured subscribers, your most loyal users – are hitting that same wall right now?
As AI technology in the contact center gains steam, the goal is not to automate human judgment out of the equation, but rather to make sure that human judgment is reserved for the moments that truly call for it, and that agents have the necessary breathing room to bring their best when those moments arrive.
The question every enterprise should be asking isn’t “how do we avoid hanging up on the Pope?” It’s:
“How do we build systems where the right action gets taken every time, regardless of who the agent is speaking to?”
When AI can navigate more complex, multi-step interactions with the same confidence it brings to straightforward, high-volume ones, your human agents are freed up to bring the kind of presence – empathy, judgment, genuine care – that no system can replicate, to the customers who need it most. There’s no reason to ever hang up for efficiency’s sake.
Here are four ways AI can make sure your team stays on the internet’s good side:
- Catch the moments that matter before they become moments you regret - Cresta Conversation Intelligence auto-scores 100% of interactions, tracks behaviors that drive resolution, and surfaces friction patterns across every call and chat. If agents were routinely hanging up on edge cases, you'd find out about it from real-time data, not Reddit. Explore Conversation Intelligence →
- Real-time guidance so agents never have to go it alone - Cresta Agent Assist guides agents with live hints, escalation cues, and workflow guidance as the conversation unfolds, particularly in unexpected ways. Explore Agent Assist →
- Answers agents need, right when they need them - Knowledge Agent listens proactively during live calls, combining what's being said with on-screen context to surface precise, cited answers instantly. Explore Knowledge Agent →
- Resolve the routine. Escalate the unusual. Never drop the thread - Cresta AI Agent combines AI reasoning with precise business logic to resolve interactions across the full spectrum, and recognizes when handing off to a human would genuinely produce a better customer experience and outcome. In these cases, it hands off seamlessly to a human with full context preserved. Explore AI Agent →
The holy grail of enterprise CX lies in systems that are intelligent enough to recognize when the rules aren’t serving the customer, and empowered enough to do something about it.
Cresta's unified platform means the same intelligence that powers your AI agents informs your human agents — and vice versa. Every conversation makes the system smarter, and every agent gets better over time. The result isn’t a system wherein AI handles one kind of conversation and humans handle another. Instead, it’s a single, continuous experience where every interaction gets exactly the right level of attention.
In case you were curious, the problem was ultimately resolved, but only because another priest happened to have a connection to the bank’s president – and even then, a policy exception had to be made. But most of your customers won’t have a priest with connections in their corner; they’ll just quietly churn.
To see how Cresta works, request your personalized demo today.
